The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 14a: Western Hypocrisy and Double Standards — Worthy versus Unworthy Victims
In this part and as the beginning of a new discussion, I will discuss Western hypocrisy and double standards in terms of especially the US empire’s deeply immoral distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims,” a pair of terms coined by Herman and Chomsky in their 1988 classic “Manufacturing Consent.” More specifically and after an outline of the five respective pairs of overlapping distinctions —1) white, 2) pro-US empire, 3) Christian, 4) European, 5) Western vs. supposedly or actually something other than that — , I will compare cases of supposedly superworthy Ukrainian victims with supposedly unworthy victims elsewhere.
16.0 Western Hypocrisy, Double Standards and Pseudo-Morality
The thing about ethics and morals is that, just like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they ultimately need to be based on an exceptionless, global or universal standard if they are supposed to be ethics and morals proper. If, on the other hand, they are based on standards that permit exceptions and that are in fact a double standards, then supposed ethics and morals become mere hypocrisy.
And it is precisely such double standards and a thereupon based pseudo-ethics and pseudo-morality but de facto moral hypocrisy that the official West uses in its evaluation of the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict as well as in other conflicts.
That may not be as clear to those inside the Western bubble and echo-chamber and to those who were successfully brainwashed with Western propaganda (see esp. parts 11 and 12) and who currently believe that “West/Ukraine good, Putin/Russia evil” like the faithful members of other cults.
But such Western hypocrisy and double standards are very clear to those outside the Western bubble and to those no longer affected by Western propaganda such as the independent political journalists and commentators Rania Khalek and Ali Abunimah:
The historian and BDS activist Vijay Prashad summed it up nicely: “This war demonstrates that the Western, um, consciousness lives in the sewer.”
Independent journalist Richard Medhurst gives a brief overview and explanation of the that Western hypocrisy and double standards:
As for the method by which we can know for certain that different standards are being applied: Just put different countries in the same situation:
Consider especially how the USA would react if there was a Russia-backed coup in Mexico or Canada and if those countries started to act in a hostile manner towards the USA and ‘ethnic USAians’ or US citizens in their country and deep inside the US sphere of influence: There would probably be a military reaction before too long.
Disinforming mainstream media who are part of the “information warfare” effort of Western parasitic elites of course mischaracterize that realization about Western hypocrisy and double standards in the Ukraine conflict and elsewhere. They for instance claim that evil Putin is engaging in evil “information warfare” in yet another Orwellian reversal and while they themselves are doing it:
Russia may admittedly indeed be involved in some information warfare. But we who are out of and no longer affected by Western propaganda generally disagree with that characterization and classic case of psychological projection:
As mentioned by Richard Medhurst, the above may lead to misplaced accusations of “whataboutery” or “whataboutism”, so to clarify also that: It is often overlooked that whataboutery comes in two very different intentions or senses.
First, whataboutery can amount to 1) a by default invalid “tu quoque fallacy” whereby immoral or criminal behavior of one party is attempted to be excused by pointing to immoral or criminal behaviour of another party along the lines of “but they stole or murdered or invaded other countries too, so me stealing or murdering or invading other countries is okay.” But that is not okay due to universal standards against that.
Second and as the perhaps intentionally ignored aspect, whataboutery can also amount to 2) saying that “If you sit in a glass house, don’t throw with stones” — i.e. as it being highly hypocritical and inappropriate to accuse others of immoral or criminal behavior when you yourself are just as or even far more guilty. As confirmed by the following passage in the Christian bible
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5, New International Version)
that other aspect of whataboutery is ancient knowledge and in my philosophical opinion a guiding and still true principle of universal morality which correctly regards such behavior as moral “hypocrisy.”
So when leftists such as Richard Medhurst, myself or many others do our whataboutery when the US empire has delusions and airs of morality and when it accuses its adversaries of wrongdoing, we generally do not do that in the first and invalid but in the second and legitimate sense: We do that to point out the total hypocrisy of the US empire whose representatives and useful idiots are in no position whatsoever to make any moral accusation against Russia or China since the US empire has done and keeps doing far worse things on the international stage. That for instance includes repeatedly nuking civilians in Japan in 1945, one great US-exceptionalism among many.
16.1 Western Hypocrisy and Double Standards About Worthy and Unworthy Victims: Five Distinctions
One of the ways in which Western hypocrisy, double standards and pseudo-morality manifest themselves in the Ukraine conflict and elsewhere is in the form of a distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims.” These two terms were coined by Herman & Chomsky in their hugely important 1988 book Manufacturing Consent in which chapter 2 is dedicated to that topic:
[T]he victims of enemy states will be found “worthy” and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage than those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly “unworthy.” It is shown in chapter 2 that a 1984 victim of the Polish Communists, the priest Ierzy Popieluszko, not only received far more coverage than Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in the U.S. client-state El Salvador in 1980; he was given more coverage than the aggregate of one hundred religious victims killed in U.S. client states, although eight of those victims were U.S. citizens.
This bias is politically advantageous to U.S. policy-makers, for focusing
on victims of enemy states shows those states to be wicked and deserving of U.S. hostility; while ignoring U.S. and client-state victims allows ongoing U.S. policies to proceed more easily, unburdened by the interference of concern over the politically inconvenient victims. (Herman & Chomsky 1988, introduction, XIX — XX)
Plenty of articles about such in the eyes of the US empire security state worthy and unworthy victims followed, such as the April 2018 one by David William Pear in Consortium News, and mine is another one. Before we examine more examples though, let us first determine and lay out the criteria by way of which the US empire security state distinguishes worthy victims from unworthy ones in all these cases.
The first pair of determinators for the worthy vs. unworthy victim appears to be the distinction of 1) white vs. non-white:
The fundamental(ly racist) white vs. non-white distinction and double standard is also used in other respects, such as when determining whether a mass killer was supposedly only a) mentally disturbed and acting on their own or b) a terrorist of a (white supremacist) terrorist network:
The second pair of determinators for worthy and unworthy victims is the one mentioned by Herman and Chomsky, i.e. the distinction between 2) part of or aligned with vs. opposed to the US empire (security state). That for instance explains the treatment of Julian Assange as a supposedly unworthy victim despite his being white or, more generally, why the crimes of the US empire somehow do not have victims in the eyes of some geniuses and US lackeys:
Then there are also some secondary or derivative factors that are largely implied by the first two such as 3) being Christian vs. (supposedly) non-Christian
or 4) being European vs. (supposedly) non-European:
“We should not forget, even if Russians look European, they are not European, in a cultural sense,” Gaub declared in the German-language interview.
“They [Russians] think differently about violence or death,” the EU official continued. “They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life, a concept of life that each individual can choose. Instead, life simply can end early with death.”
To try to justify her bigoted views, Gaub said that “Russian life expectancy is quite low, as you know. It is 70 for men.”
She failed to explain that Russians had a healthy life expectancy under socialism in the Soviet Union, but after the United States and Western Europe overthrew the USSR from 1989 to 1991, they imposed brutal capitalist “shock therapy” on Russia that caused life expectancy to fall precipitously.
A 2001 UNICEF report found that the grueling capitalist reforms forced on Russia in the 1990s caused 3.2 million excess deaths, leading life expectancy for men to drop by six years.
In this period of Western-imposed mass privatizations and free market fundamentalism, 18 million Russian children were pushed into poverty. Over one-third of the population lived in poverty, with mass unemployment. There were high levels of child malnutrition, and a steep increase in HIV and tuberculosis cases.
The Russian Federation was not able to get back to the level of life expectancy it had had under socialism in the Soviet Union in 1989 until 22 years later, in 2011.
In other words, it took Russia two decades to recover from the devastating economic attack waged on it by the Western powers.
Big surprise: NATO and US empire shill Florence Gaub also loves the US empire war propaganda movie Maverick:
Another example from the Murdoch press:
The fifth and most general or encompassing distinguisher is that of 5) being a Westerner vs. a non-Westerner, and it is these five pairs of distinctions by way of which the US empire security state and its propaganda distinguishes worthy from unworthy victims.
It would be nice it if were different, if the West actually had universally valid standards for all victims, including first and foremost for the victims of its own crimes. But that is unfortunately not the case (yet) due to rampant Western hypocrisy and double standards and thereupon based pseudomorality which partially result from unintentional biases and partially from intentional manufacturing of consent by parasitic Western elites:
So whenever there is talk about ‘Western values,’ keep in mind that hypocrisy and double standards rank very high among those (meta)values and that they are in many ways the true Western values.
16.1.1 Unworthy Civilian Victims in the Separatist Regions Donetsk and Luhansk
The result of such stunning Western hypocrisy, double standards and pseudomorality are millions and billions of supposedly unworthy victims of Western empires and now the US empire around the globe. Let us go through some respective places and examples, beginning with the separatist regions in Ukraine:
From a different massacre of unworthy because not US-allied and not European/Western (enough) civilian victims:
16.1.2 Unworthy Civilian Victims in Libya
The even more unworthy because now not even Christian victims who do not tick any of the five boxes of worthy victims can be found in further away places with darker skinned people. One of these places is Libya, a formerly oil-wealthy but now destroyed country and “failed state” in North Africa that was made to fail by Western empires, former (France and Britain) and present (USA):
The background for that destruction of Libya is that its leader Muammar al-Gaddafi — who was influenced by Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Egypt’s leader Nasser before turning to Pan-Africanism— was a thorn in the side of the white colonial powers who ultimately killed him like other African anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist leaders (e.g. the Congolese Patrice Lumumba in 1961).
The event that most likely triggered the West’s attack on Libya was Gaddafi’s 2009 announcement of a pan-African Gold dinar that would have been bad for both the US Dollar and the CFA Franc (from Colonies françaises d’Afrique, “French colonies of Africa”) that is still used as a colonial currency in Africa, the latter being the means by which France exerts financial control over of its ‘former’ colonies.
Needless to say, Libya’s more than 140 tonnes of gold that would have been the basis for such a Gold dinar were also stolen by the Western conquistadores, together with Libya’s and its people’s future.
16.1.3 Unworthy Civilian Victims in Afghanistan
Then there are also the unworthy civilian victims in Afghanistan who are so incredibly unworthy that you can even freeze billions of dollars of badly needed funds
…or steal them right out in the open:
The different treatment of civilian victims of war in Ukraine (very worthy) versus those in Afghanistan that were killed by the USA (very unworthy ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’) is also a thing to behold:
Also noteworthy: The disinforming MSM’s propagandistic omission of the role of Western sanctions in Afghan suffering:
Furthermore:
That ‘Western values’ shitshow of (not universal values but) local pseudovalues was even continued in the US-territory of Germany where undesirable refugees from Afghanistan had to make way for the much more desirable refugees and worthy (because white, Christian, European) victims from Ukraine:
16.1.4 Unworthy Civilian Victims in Syria
‘Western values’ hypocrisy and double standards are furthermore apparent when we compare the treatment of Syrian refugees and migrants and the ‘refugee crisis’ theater with the treatment of Ukrainian refugees and the strange absence of any such crisis:
16.1.5 Unworthy Civilian Victims in Yemen
Western hypocrisy and double standards about unworthy victims are also observable when it comes to the situation Yemen which a UN agency once again described as “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis” in November 2021:
Two-thirds of the population, or 20.7 million people, need humanitarian assistance in 2021. Multiple emergencies have pummeled the country: violent conflict, an economic blockade, currency collapse, flooding and the COVID-19 pandemic in a country where only half of health facilities are operational.
An estimated 73 per cent of the over 4 million people displaced in Yemen are women and children, while approximately 30 per cent of displaced households are now led by women.
More than 6 million women require urgent access to protection services, while 5 million women and adolescent girls of childbearing age have restricted or no access to reproductive health services. One woman dies every two hours during childbirth, an almost entirely preventable tragedy. More than a million pregnant and breastfeeding women are already acutely malnourished, a number that could double with the food insecurity Yemen is facing.
The usual distinction between worthy and unworthy victims also plays out here: Saudi Arabia, which is waging war against Yemen with US weapons and to the benefit of US weapons manufacturers, is a US ally. The victims which Saudi Arabia produces in Yemen are therefore unworthy victims. Ironically and insanely enough and true to the Western parasitic elites’ moral insanity, the US ambassdor to the UN had nothing better to do than to accuse Russia(!) of creating food instability in Yemen:
16.1.6 Unworthy Civilian Victims in Morocco
Here there is a video where you can see Moroccan ‘security’ forces hitting an already lying and not moving man on the knee with a baton, with another ‘security’ tossing a black person on that heap of human misery like garbage:
16.1.7 Unworthy Civilian Victims in Palestine
Due to Israel’s alliance with the US empire, some of the most unworthy victims are of course also the native Palestinians who have been struggling the longest against grave injustices:
Another particularly perverse thing here is that Palestinians are not only treated as unworthy victims of evident settler-colonialist crimes of Zionist Israel. More than that and due to a classic Orwellian reversal of facts which parasitic elites are so fond of, Palestinians are even treated as the perpetrators whose name must not even be uttered according to the nationalist myths and overall propaganda (“hasbara”) of settler-colonialist Zionists inside and outside of Israel.
From the following March 12, 2022, Guardian article by Arwa Mahdawi:
Progressive, except for Palestine
What starts with “P” ends with “E” and is too terrifying a word for many people to so much as mention? “Palestine”, of course! Simply uttering the P-word in a vaguely sympathetic way can be enough to elicit bad faith accusations of antisemitism. The topic has become so loaded that some people seemingly prefer to pretend Palestine and Palestinians don’t exist and just ignore the issue altogether. Nothing makes liberals abandon their progressive values, or their courage, like someone mentioning Palestine.
It is in particular with in the context of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation that disgusting Western hypocrisy and double standards about supposedly good Ukrainian vs. supposedly bad Palestinian armed resistance become apparent:
Another insane Western hypocrisy and double standard: Israeli-Zionist settler-colonialist who see little to nothing wrong with invading and taking Palestinian land and killing Palestinians (= unworthy victims to perpetrators) are praying for invaded Ukraine and its by contrast very worthy victims:
16.1.7 Ireland, a notable exception from Western Hypocrisy and Double Standards
In all that sickening Western hypocrisy and double standards, it is good to see that there is at least a respectable number of politicians from Ireland — itself subjected to British invasion and still ongoing settler-colonialism — who thoroughly reject and attack that Western pseudomorality about Ukrainian superworthy victims and unworthy victims elsewhere:
From the Irish MEP Clary Daly, March 7, 2022 (1:30–2:53):
“There’s no doubt about it, we’re living in times of catastrophic crisis, where the lives of innocent civilians are sacrificed for the wars of their masters. Yes, in Ukraine, but not only.
Since the last plenary, tens of thousands of Afghani citizens have been forced to flee in search of food and safety. 5 million children face famine, an agonizing and painful death, a 500% increase in child marriages and children being sold just so they can survive. And not a mention of it. Not here, not anywhere. No wall-to-wall TV coverage, no emergency humanitarian response, no special plenaries, not even a mention in this plenary. No Afghani delegations and no statements.
My God, they must be wondering what makes their humanitarian crisis so unimportant. Is it the color of their skin? Is it that they’re not white? They’re not European? That their problems come from a US gun or US invasion? Is it that the decision to rob their country’s wealth was taken by a despotic US president rather than a Russian one? Because, my God, all wars are evil, and all victims deserve support.
And until we get on that page, we have no credibility whatsoever.
From the Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett (4:05–7:50):
“Amnesty International […] and Human Rights Watch, within a very short period of time, issue these damning reports, saying that Israel, since its foundation, has been built on a system of oppression and domination and apartheid and racism, involving the murder of unarmed, innocent civilians on a regular basis, arbitrary detention and imprisonment, land annexations, the displacements of people, the denial of basic fundamental human rights, to 6 million Palestinians, who are displaced outside Israel and the occupied territories […] the illegal blockade of Gaza […] which has left Gaza in a permanent state of humanitarian crisis […].
And yet you want to be careful about your language. You’re happy to correctly use the most strong and robust language to describe the crimes against humanity of Vladimir Putin. But you will not use the same strength of language when it comes to describing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. […]
Now you see if you are going to have moral standards, those standards have to be consistent. Otherwise, they are not standards at all. They’re just cynicism.
It was in particular the morally insane Western hypocrisy and double standards about supposedly worthy victims in Ukraine and supposedly unworthy victims in Palestine that Irish policians drew attention to. The Irish are in a better position to understand all that due to their own Irish history featuring an even longer colonial occupation by British imperialists who decided (e.g. via the 1917 Balfour declaration) that it would be fine for Jewish Zionist settler-colonialists to start a similar project in the Middle East, — last but not least since that settler-colonialist project was also envisioned as a stronghold for the British empire and its interests in the region.
The Irish list of honorable mentions in this regard include Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Féin, “We Ourselves”)
John Brady (Sinn Fein)
Mary Lou McDonald (President of Sinn Féin since 2018)
Chris Andrews (Sinn Féin)
and the already mentioned Richard Boyd Barrett (People Before Profit/Solidarity):
Conclusion: Total Western Hypocrisy, Double Standards — and Moral Bankruptcy
The to be drawn conclusion that became much more apparent in the wake of the Ukraine conflict is that the Western 1%’s values consist of rank hypocrisy and double standards— something on which the supposedly and indeed ‘exceptionalist’ and morally bankrupt US empire security state and its ideology is built.
Such Western hypocrisy and double standards are the in many ways true and fundamental ‘Western values’ that stink to the heavens. They also determine and explain why some victims (e.g. Ukrainian civilians getting killed by the Russian military as collateral damage) are evaluated as “worthy victims” and why others in similar or worse situations (e.g. Palestinian high-profile journalists or lawyers getting intentionally murdered by the Israeli military; see the next part) are evaluated as “unworthy victims.” The respective overlapping distinctions were analyzed as consisting of being 1) white, 2) pro-US empire, 3) Christian, 4) European and most generally 5) Western vs. supposedly or actually being something other than that: The less of the former (especially 1 and 2), the more unworthy victims are, generally speaking.
Since stunning Western hypocrisy and double standards and thereupon based immorality also function as a thick layer of ignorance and delusion though, the US empire and its physically as well as mentally occupied or colonized territories such as Germany do not understand the actual foundation of their merely local and highly biased values and their deep moral failings or at least pretend to not understand them. That ignorance in turn explains why they often to consistently are on the wrong side of history, i.e. on the side of the oppressors (e.g. Zionist Israel) as opposed to on the side of the oppressed (Palestinians).
As a consequence of their hypocrisy, double standards and thereupon resting immorality and ignorance, too many Westerners also do not see anything wrong with blaming Russia (for overall relatively sane military actions that were largely provoked by the US empire and their Banderite neonazi vassall- or client-state Ukraine; see part 1 or part 9) while failing to adequately blame the so to speak genuine and interfaith “axis of evil” of Saudi Arabia (far worse military actions against Yemen), Israel (the longest oppression of a people by a settler-colonialist state in recent history) or above all the US empire and its lapdogs such as Britain or Australia:
And that is highly ironic, insane and dangerous, because the US empire security state is the by far worst “state terrorist” or “terrorist empire” in the world that has been the main cause of unmeasurable suffering around the globe for many decades (the destructive — and for the US military industrial complex very profitable — bombing and partition of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). The US empire is also the main material cause for why those and other major military conflicts even broke out, including the one in Ukraine (again see part 1 or part 9):
Unfortunately, there are still too many ignorant and deeply propagandized people, and as a result of their propaganda-induced ignorance about the US empire and their failure to take action against it, it is now Ukraine that got “wrecked” — including financially — by that empire’s actions and as per earlier predictions:
The US empire and its imperialist-capitalist policies consequently also need be regarded as one of the greatest causes of creating refugees, displaced people and migrants. From this Multipolarista article by Abraham Marquez:
The United Nations reports that there are 26.4 million refugees worldwide, and 82.4 million people have been forcibly displaced. Many of these originate from countries that the United States has illegally tried to destabilize and overthrow.
The largest group of refugees, at 6.7 million (27%), come from Syria. Since 2011, the US has waged a dirty war on Syria, spending billions of dollars arming and training extremist militants aimed at violently toppling its government. Still today, US troops illegally occupy one-third of Syrian sovereign territory, in the area that happens to have much of the country’s oil and wheat.
The second-biggest group of refugees, at 4 million (16%), come from Venezuela, where the US has failed in many coup attempts to overthrow the democratically elected leftist government. Washington’s deadly and illegal sanctions caused the deaths of at least 40,000 Venezuelan civilians from 2017 to 2018, and unleashed an economic crisis that fueled much of this mass migration.
The third-largest group of refugees, at 2.6 million (11%), come from Afghanistan, where the US invasion killed hundreds of thousands of people in a 20-year war and military occupation. In 2019 alone, the US military dropped 7,423 bombs on Afghanistan. Today Washington freezes the country’s assets, starving its people.
The fourth-biggest group of refugees, at 2.2 million (9%), come from South Sudan, a region that continues to suffer from imperialist interventions.
The fifth-largest group of refugees, at 1.1 million (5%), come from Myanmar, where Washington has meddled as well.
For decades, there have also consistently been millions of Palestinian refugees worldwide. Today there are more than 7 million. But they are often excluded from the total count of refugees and thus invisibilized, because their families were ethnically cleansed and expelled by Israel and have been prevented from returning.
For all of those and other long-standing reasons, the US empire was rightly voted as being the “greatest threat to world peace” in 2013 in a global poll by WIN/Gallup during the Obama regime:
It is therefore not Russia, which does very valuable resistance work against the advances of the totally insane US empire just like China, Iran, Syria, Venezula, Cuba and an increasing number of other countries, but the US empire which needs to be stopped and sanctioned:
And one of the keys to understanding and implementing that is to understand that ‘Western values’ are a hypocrisy- and double standard-based immoral Orwellian shitshow that also includes an insane distinction between supposedly worthy and supposedly unworthy victims.
Once that and the respective propaganda is understood, it can also be understood that the US empire is simply not a ‘nation-builder’ or a ‘good world policeman,’ but indeed “the greatest threat to world peace” and a nation destroyer — see Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and most recently Ukraine, with perhaps your country or even continent (Europe) being next.
For all of those reasons and also so as to arrive at a genuine and universal understanding of of what is good and right, it is especially the West that needs to get rid of its sickening and certainly also propaganda-induced hypocrisy and double standards that not only keep causing so much harm around the globe.
Furthermore, these factors may even lead to the end of human civilization if Western parasitic elites and their captured hosts keep pushing their hypocrisy- and double standards-based insane imperialist agendas against the nuclear superpowers Russia and China which were both deeply humiliated by the British and/or US empires (1990s Jelzin era and 19th-20th century respectively) and which, after having learned their respective lessons from history, will no longer be subjected to the rule of Western empires.
As a European, I wish that Europe would learn from them and kick the US empire out too before its too late. But first we need to get rid of Western hypocrisy, double standards and pseudo-morality which stand in the way of that — and in the meantime, the US empire will continue its subjugation and destruction of Europe and other places under that screen of lies and propaganda.
